Is there a printed instruction manual I can download somewhere?

Question?

Do you have a printed manual or a maybe a PDF could download and print out? I'd love to have a complete guide to Populi so I can refer to it, make notes, and remember things that I learn along the way... so, do you have such a thing or is the Help System the only manual you offer?

Answer!

Our online Knowledge Base is the only "how-to" manual we offer. All other considerations aside, we don't offer a printed version because we're always updating and improving and, well, changing Populi. The Knowledge Base enables us to keep the documentation up-to-date with the software; printed manuals would go out of date and would ultimately lead to user confusion.

However, the tangible, printed word shall always be valuable, despite what the Internet Solons would have us think. You can print any page from the Knowledge Base by using your browser's Print functions. Just hit CTRL + P on your keyboard, and print away to your heart's content. Newer computers usually have a PDF option alongside the standard Printing options. Of course, keep in mind the general caveats about relying on static, printed materials for a program that's updated as often as Populi.

FYI, the software we use for our Knowledge Base (Zendesk) plans to add the ability to generate PDF's from Forum Topics. We have no timeline on that, but we presume it'll be pretty obvious whenever they release that feature.

3 Comments

I think the largest unnecessary loss in some knowledge bases is a systematic way of knowing you've read EVERYTHING in that knowledge base. Does Populi's knowledge base have a systematic process for reading it from beginning to end (even though it changes in the process?) :-)

Other than systematically working through the Forums and articles one-by-one, there isn't any logical process to reading the entire KB all the way through. It's necessarily non-linear because some people come in looking for info on Academics, others Admissions, others Financial Aid, and so on—I can't really tell people to jump to chapter 7 if they want to know how to upload a file to a course. I've not really seen any web-based system that tries to make sure you've read everything; Wikipedia certainly has no such thing in place, and if KBs are modeled after anything (navigation-wise, that is), it would probably be a wiki...

It's when I'm causually reading the Populi Knowledge Base that I come across real gems of information. You've got the best knowledge base I've ever seen. I just wish I could be sure to read it all. Just having a non-ordered list of each link would suffice, but it would be just one more page for Populi to maintain, and I can understand that. Have a great day Brendan!